I have recently taken over a site and tried to migrate it to a new hosting provider. (GoDaddy) I used the Akeeba backup feature and successfully restored the site on the new server only to have it seem to disappear a few minutes later and give me the following error:

"The requested resource could not be loaded because the server returned an error:
500 Internal Server Error (?)."

I have come across a few suggestions with no success.

Thank you.

Last edited by bands321 on Mon Sep 26, 2016 4:05 pm, edited 2 times in total.

You haven't locked yourself out of the site- you just need to use the ip address with the sitename folder to access the site. eg. http://123.456.123.456/~mysitename/index.php
You'll probably need to look at the error logs to find the script that's causing the issue. In most cases you'll just need to tweak the server settings (if you have access to them in your hosting arrangement) rather than mess with any code.

It's not disappearing, you just have a 500 error. It seems to me (from the limited info i have on this case) that the install may have gone fine, but there's a server configuration issue thats throwing an error. You need to look at your error logs to the script that's to blame. You should be able to test this using the domain alias method I mentioned above

I have looked into the logs and I can't see anything that seems "out of place". I am VERY new to Joomla and am not sure how to "tweak the server settings" or where to find them for that matter.

Where would I look to see if there is a server configuration issue?

Thank you again for your assistance.

Another thought, since this site is running on an older version of Joomla (2.5.6) could I install the newer version through GoDaddy so that the Joomla install is fresh and then just pull over the files needed for the site? If so, what files would I need to grab?

A couple of things:
-Can you access the site by using the IP address method? Unless you can browse the site (albeit a blank page at the moment) then there's no use going any further.
-Go to configuration.php and change

which might give you more info on the nature of the php error.
-If you know how to use phpinfo to get server details, then find where your php.ini file is (or put one in the site root folder) and set the memory limit

The memory limit can quite often be the culprit, and often it results in you not getting proper error reporting I've found.
Loading a fresh Joomla install might be worthwhile as a test to see if your new server is compatible with the latest Joomla, but starting with a blank site and imp0rting content and extensions and configuration and, and, and... I wouldn't recommend it- It'll be a super-fiddly job and you're better off just finding the source of the current error and fixing that.